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Daily Tech News 2 January 2026

Top Story

• OpenAI is betting big on audio. (Tech Crunch)

  OpenAI is betting big on audio AI, and it's not just about making ChatGPT sound better. According to new reporting from The Information, the company has unified several engineering, product, and research teams over the past two months to overhaul its audio models, all in preparation for an audio-first personal device expected to launch in about a year.

  This is going to sink without a trace and I am here for it.

  It's not just the tech giants placing this bet. A motley crew of startups has emerged with the same conviction, albeit with varying degrees of success. The makers of the Humane AI Pin burned through hundreds of millions before their screenless wearable became a cautionary tale.

  OpenAI's effort is going to burn through far more money and achieve the same results, which is to say none whatsoever.
  
  We already have phones. They already do everything these AI devices do, and more, and if we don't want to look at the screen, we can just not look at the screen.
  
  But there's a reason video killed the radio star.
  
  At least Tech Crunch has an early entry in its "Dumbest Things in Tech in 2026" roundup.
  
  
  
• The phone is dead long live... What, exactly? (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI and the unlamented Humane pin are not alone in this folly. There's billions of dollars chasing this lack of ideas.
  
  The one place where I see possibility is AI glasses. You can integrate a camera and a speaker and a microphone and a tiny display. Your hands are free to do whatever. There are problems, yes, but also real value.
  
  
  

Tech News

• On the other hand, Apple reportedly shipped just 45,000 Vision Pro headsets in the fourth quarter. (Financial Times) (archive site)
  
  That has all the listed features - but it's bulky, heavy, costs $3500, and does nothing.
  
  
  
• Orange Pi's new single board computer runs circles around the Raspberry Pi 5. (Notebook Check)
  
  It has 16 cores running at 1.9GHz, 10 AI cores each able to perform 4096 multiple-and-add operations per clock cycle, and 48GB or 96GB of RAM. Do not expect this one to be cheap.
  
  They have also announced - at least in China - the Orange Pi AI Studio Pro which runs two of these boards linked together. Price not listed for that one either.
  
  
  
• It looks like a NES that shrank in the wash. Inside is a Ryzen 370 12 core CPU. (Notebook Check)
  
  It's designed for emulating old video game hardware, and it will certainly do that, but it seems a little bit overkill.
  
  
  
• Sony's PlayStation 5 just got hacked forever. Here's why that's a good thing. (Hot Hardware)
  
  The hack here was the leaking of secure boot keys for the hardware, which means that owners can now jailbreak their PlayStation. Sony can release new hardware that can't be jailbroken - and probably will - but it can't do anything about the 85 million consoles already sold.
  
  
  
• It's "Fuck the Consumer" year at the Consumer Electronics Show. (WCCFTech)
  
  Nvidia will announced no consumer products at all, AMD will announce only relabels of existing products, and Intel will announce Panther lake, which is not a bad product unless you need more than four full-speed cores because that's all it has. (And all three versions of Panther Lake announced involve major tradeoffs even with that limit stipulated.)
  
  
  
• The European Space Agency got hacked. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Though the biggest question here is why anybody would bother.
  
  
  
• I think I bought too many computers. The parts I need for Froppy just shipped, and I've run out of names for all the others.
  
  On the other hand, I'm now thoroughly covered in case I start having hardware failures in the older systems, and I can re-use all the old RAM and SSDs in newer motherboards. And I didn't pay hyper-inflated prices for any of it.
  
  

Musical Interlude



Song is Konya wa Hurricane from the anime Bubblegum Crisis. Anime is... Oh. You guessed.

One of the best opening sequences to anything ever. Apart from the great soundtrack, it introduces us to all the major characters without telling you that they are the major characters, and to the premise of the series without saying a word. There are a couple of minutes of establishing shots before the song starts, but I chose this clip precisely because it has those.


Disclaimer: Burning touch? We have pills for that now.